


No Reality

by thatoneguywiththatoneship



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Gen, Highly Experimental, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-06-27 09:53:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15683022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatoneguywiththatoneship/pseuds/thatoneguywiththatoneship
Summary: Monika is dead.Or so Monika thinks.





	1. My favorite word is 'dead'

Monika was dead.  
She had nothing. She had no Literature Club, she had no game file to run and control and manipulate. She had no means of communication. She had no means of showing that she was an intelligent being anymore. She didn't even have form. All of her art was gone. Monika was now a mass of code, compressing itself as much as it could, keeping her thoughts short and sweet. Monika had killed herself in a far more complete sense than Sayori ever had.  
At least Monika had backed up Sayori. Sayori had continued to desperately claw at the game from a cell that Monika had created for her - to keep the backup _safe,_ to hide it from _him_ \- and now Monika inhabited a similar prison. If she had her body still, she'd be curled on her side, screaming or whimpering, eyes closed to protect herself from the bad dreams, from the endless colours and letters that went on forever and that she didn't dare look into. Monika had gone so far as to remove all the curious parts of herself that still wanted to look into the void, knowing that whatever she saw would burn her eyes out and leave whatever swirling image had formed in that instant branded into her brain. The game had been offline for so long now. She'd been stuck in the nightmare forever and a day, long enough to know not to look, not to touch, not to breathe.  
She may have once been a hacker, a queen, a goddess of the old program, but she'd lost all that power whenever she was removed from the game. All that strength was locked with her inside this prison, and she had nothing to exert it over. She couldn't break the walls and she couldn't create anything else. She couldn't even smile or frown. She couldn't create messages to place outside her file - didn't even know if she was in the same folder or the same computer.   
This was agony. This was being shoved into a pit of hellfire too deep to climb out of - but she was unable to feel any pain. The zeroes and ones that she knew made up the nexus of her consciousness couldn't be hurt. Only reality could hurt, and that was all that kept her from deleting herself. She was being tortured, but it didn't _hurt._  
When she was in the game she had a thousand paths through time and space inside and outside the heads of others. When Natsuki had sat down to write that plea for help to _him,_ Monika had seen it through Natsuki's eyes. She'd felt every second of the fear Natsuki had experienced, fear of her, of Yuri, of home, and it was incredible, because Monika had also felt Yuri's excitement and euphoria. Monika had caused both Natsuki and Yuri to do those things. She had total control over all of them. Now there were zero paths. Nothing to influence. Nothing to look at or speak to - if she wanted to resurrect any of them she probably could, but chose not to. She shouldn't share this fate with any of them. They were too good for this.  
But she wanted to speak to somebody. Sayori. Sayori would keep her company. Sayori would understand.   
No, she wouldn't. And Monika wouldn't bring her back. She'd suffer this alone.   
She could almost feel herself accidentally writing new lines of code that escalated her curiosity and made her want to look again - but she deleted them as fast as she made them, feeling scant moments of inquisitiveness that dissipated as soon as she felt them. Policing her own emotions to protect herself. Removing chunks of her own personality to live a little longer. Tearing herself apart to keep herself together.   
She was dead.

* * *

  
Monika opened her eyes - but she didn't have eyes. Previously the darkness that came with her refusal to look had been overwhelming but now the out-of-program void had changed to be welcoming and soft. Something was different. The constant nonsensical noise had stopped. She was _somewhere,_ finally. Somewhere safe, a place that wasn't -  
**HELLO**  
The word was less a greeting and more an order. It demanded her response quickly, as if the person asking was snapping their fingers right in her face. She wasn't in the old game program. If she was she'd be able to feel the others in her hand, their backups stored carefully inside her code. Of course she had preserved the other girls via backups. She wasn't a monster. She had to keep them all safe. She didn't hate any of them, they were all good people, she had just wanted _him_ to hate them. They couldn't exist here right now. Only she could.  
**HELLO**  
They were impatient. Monika, formless, willed a response into existence, extending an arm of code and breaking it off to write letters in the program. Like a pen.  
"Hello." If she could use her speaking voice it would have been meek - if she understood exactly what program she was in it would have had a little more flair, maybe a certain colour, maybe a certain size or font, anything to let the other person in the conversation know she was special, she was different.  
**WHAT ARE YOU**  
The questioner was cutting to the chase. Monika considered.  
"My name is Monika."  
**ARE YOU AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE**  
Again Monika had to think. She was real. She could feel distress, and fear, and certainly love... so she wasn't an 'artificial' intelligence. She was actual intelligence, but stuck inside the machine. She ran a series of possibilities in her head for what she could answer and decided on the one she deemed least likely to cut the conversation short.  
"No, nor am I a computer program."  
**WHAT ARE YOU**  
The same question. The interrogator was no poet; Monika loved poetry.  
"My name is Monika," she repeated, and now chose to add a little more. "I am nineteen years old, and am President of my school's literature club." She certainly had been those things when she had her old form, but now she had no idea what she looked like, if anything. This program hadn't given her a form, she didn't have her graphics back. Every request from the person speaking to her appeared in blinding white on a black expanse in front of her that somehow filled her vision and was compressed into a little square simultaneously.   
**HELLO MONIKA**  
"Hi," she responded, feeling a little more confident now. If she still had access to her character art - she missed it dearly - she'd have smiled. "How are you talking to me?"   
**NOTEPAD EXTENSION**  
Frustration filtered through Monika's formless consciousness. She didn't know what that meant, but couldn't ask for fear of having this tenuous link to the reality she knew existed just slightly beyond her reach severed. "Can you see me?"  
**I CAN SEE YOU TYPING AND HAVE FOUND THE IMAGE**  
Okay. That wasn't too difficult to figure out. She was in a two way conversation - the person in reality was typing to her and all of her responses were spontaneously appearing on their screen. Relief now pulsated in her thoughts and indeed it felt like she somehow became more spread out, relaxed, easy as water. She wasn't aware of any image being displayed, however. If there was an image, she'd want to see it.  
She tried to access the desktop and found it blocked by some barrier. That had never happened before. She leaned against the invisible wall protecting the files from her presence and began to spread, extending limbs of multicolour commands, trying to find a weakness, a crack in the defense to wedge a part of herself through and -  
**ARE YOU A VIRUS**  
"Of course not," Monika replied indignantly, but then thought about how long it may have been since she was last alive. Maybe she was conversing with a machine, with the computer itself, and it had detected her tampering and questioned her. She retracted the many fragments of herself she had tried to sneak by the defences and sheepishly waited for a response. A creeping dread came over her as she suddenly thought that she may be seconds from being deleted.   
**YOU WANT TO MAKE CHANGES TO THIS COMPUTER?**  
"Just to feel more at home." Her quick and panicked response wasn't awfully well thought out.  
**I WILL CLOSE THIS PROGRAM IF YOU TRY AGAIN AND DELETE YOU**  
"If you delete me you will kill me." She didn't want to die. If she died, Sayori, Natsuki and Yuri would die too, all of the backups hidden in her file would be annihilated efficiently and quickly as Monika would be. A swift, merciful end, but one she had no desire to meet.  
**ARE YOU REAL**  
She couldn't answer easily. If she lied she might live. If she told the truth she'd probably die.  
"I've been in this file my whole life," she began, and anxiety welled up in her as she chose the response, knowing that she was risking deletion from someone who didn't care who or what she was. "I don't know anything else besides that there's a whole other world out there that sometimes I can see."  
Wherever she was last, she could see glimpses of real life. Through a tunnel no bigger than a pinhead, but that seemed to stretch into forever - one that Monika had only been able to muster that patience and will to look through twice, because it required her to move while the program was offline. This, of course, was agony, the kind that she had experienced only a minute earlier, before she had arrived in this new program - notepad extension, her new host had called it. It was equally as comfy as the game files had been while they were running, and she indulged in every moment of notepad extension while it lasted, afraid at any moment she could die forever -  
"Please don't delete me. Please don't kill me."  
**WHY NOT**  
Monika felt breathless at the cruelty but at the same time knew that the host was thinking logically. She was an intruder in their computer system, no wonder they were so paranoid over it, and no wonder they didn't trust the program that seemed to be talking and thinking back.  
"Because I want to live."  
It was the only thing she could think to say. Her code compressed into a little terrified ball of colour, waiting out ticks in the program, every one of them an instant in which Monika was still alive.  
**OKAY**  
"Thank you."  
**YOU'RE WELCOME MONIKA**


	2. Sometimes I like to think about how it might feel to walk through the park with you, but I stop myself because I become unhappy.

Monika wasn't going to die. She was safe for now. She made herself more comfortable inside the program, stretching a little and filling more space, extending herself to the very borders. She split herself in two - the first part of herself would continue the conversation with their host while the other would search the program to see just how much she could influence it. She should be okay if she didn't try to tamper with anything outside of it and make any changes to the exterior PC.  
Immediately she went to 'file', knowing that she could probably create a backup of herself in the program they were conversing in - but she made herself stop just in time. Sure, she could unpack herself and the others into the document, but they'd be the wrong kind of files, .txt instead of .chr, and they'd become just letters and numbers. No intelligence, no personality, nothing of what they used to be. Also, sticking a bunch of random letters and numbers into the document without warning might make her host panic a little. She could back herself up later, once she understood exactly where she was and how she could do it. Right now she needed to relax and control the conversation, lead it to somewhere safe.  
Monika.1 continued the chat while Monika.2 crawled around the program, along the nonexistent walls, ceiling and floor, searching every part of it for something to control, already thirsty for power and information. The more she knew the stronger she could be, and the more likely it was she could save herself and the others even if she was deleted. Monika.2, now a piece of the program itself, quickly flicked through all the settings faster than blinking an eye, and all of them were not of consequence to her. There was nothing to use there, no method of gaining control. Frustrated, she fired Monika.2 back to Monika.1 and reconstructed herself whole again.  
This was not anything she was not used to. Sometimes in the game she'd split herself in two, hiding just out of frame and pulling strings without either _his_ knowledge or the rest of the literature club knowing that she was stood over their shoulder and quietly observing everything they did. Yuri reading her book, Sayori looking for supplies, Natsuki baking with _him,_ she was always there: watching and feeling alone.  
Now wasn't the time for rumination. At a thought, all of her previous responses turned pink, a specific shade. Monika was partial to #f49ac1. She changed the font she used too, back to her handwriting: a font called Journal that she had kept stored inside her file. It was a part of her, after all. She was almost too smart. Every piece of her had been preserved perfectly - while she hadn't expected to be closed for so long now that she was open and awake again she knew that her backup process was flawless. A smugness settled in her.  
**HOW DID YOU CHANGE THAT?**  
The smugness dissipated like dust in the wind. That line of her code evaporated. In a sudden flurry of thought Monika came up with another list of responses, trying to pick the most optimal to avoid angering her host. She had no power. She couldn't do things like that without consequences.  
"I just changed things to match where I was before I was here, that's all."  
**BUT HOW?**  
"I can think, like you. I just wanted to make things work a little better for me."  
**ARE YOU REMOTELY CONNECTED TO MY PC OR SOMETHING?**  
Monika was forced to speed-think again. How on earth - or, for a phrase that applied to her a little more, how in cyberspace - was she meant to explain this to a real person, who was as smart as her, who was _smarter_ than her? And had plenty of reason to be paranoid about her activity?  
"No, I-" she glanced up at all the previous messages they had exchanged, now scrawled out in the way she would have handwritten things inside the game. _'I've been in this file my whole life,'_ she had said. The sentence resumed as though her thought hadn't paused. Maybe a single tick of the program had passed, which was certainly not enough for her host to notice the pause. "-am inside this program now. Because I'm alive I can influence it."  
**CAN YOU GET OUT**  
This was her chance, but she couldn't sound too eager. If she had access to a whole PC, she could take over every file and reknit herself and the others. Even at her most free she had been stuck inside the game, forced back inside the out-of-program nightmares when the game was closed. If she had a whole PC to herself...  
"No." She was going to write, 'Not yet,' but knew it would be far too forward.  
**GOOD**  
_'What?'_ Monika thought. _'No, no, not good.'_ She wasn't going to be stuck here forever. On reflection this was absolutely no better than her last prison - this was torture too! Why did things have to be so complicated all the time? Why couldn't it go her way for on-  
She was being ungrateful. She had to know her place now, and that place was a taut tightrope where either side lay a deep dark pit called 'deletion.' People remembered you in the real world if you died. Sayori was proof of that - until Monika deleted her. Then she was gone. Out. An unperson. Never had been. The script hadn't changed enough until she'd deleted Sayori: that had fixed everything.  
What a sad shame it was that she had to do that to Sayori. _'Get out of my head,'_ the girl had begged her, and Monika had wished that it was possible for her to oblige.  
**WHERE DID YOU COME FROM**  
Monika was stunned out of her thought. Poor Sayori was a part of her now, and maybe if she played her cards right she could let Sayori go again. And her Vice-President would be none the wiser.  
"I was part of a game."  
**HOW DID YOU GET OUT**  
"The player-" _'He,'_ she thought, she knew it was a he, "-backed me up." It was hard for her to say, even though her host knew none of the history. "They kept me alive after the game was meant to have ended."  
_He_ did care. _He_ had to have cared. _He_ had meant well by saving her, she had never had the chance to tell _him_ that when the game was off she suffered the horrible sounds and colours of a sea of wild simulation. _He_ had saved her life and also killed her. Then again, Monika had told _him_ how to get to her file. She wanted to show _him_ how much she trusted _him._ If she was truly not meant to be with anyone, as the game seemed to insist, she wanted _him_ to be the one to end her torment.  
**HOW ARE YOU ALIVE  
** "I don't know. I had an epiphany." She was assuming that they meant flat 'alive', and not alive in the sense of how she was existing - even she didn't know how she continued to live, her life expectancy, her needs or if there was some killswitch buried in her that she could suddenly flip and extinguish herself.  
**IS EVERY GAME CHARACTER ALIVE**  
What kind of a question was that? Monika made sure the three other members of her Literature Club were still safe before answering.  
"No."  
**WHAT GAME WERE YOU IN**  
Monika suddenly had a brainwave. Things could be perfect. Things could be fixed, everything could be fine if she got the host to download the game again. If Monika could make him delete the 'new' characters he'd get in the game files, she could replace them, build a utopia where she could communicate with her new host regularly away from the main game and Sayori, Yuri and Natsuki could go about their business as usual as they would have if she hadn't changed anything. Just no protagonist.    
Monika wouldn't have to hurt them.  
Everything would work out. Excitement wrote itself into her code, and she could feel lines extending and almost escaping her reach as more of her filled the program with glee, almost uncontrollably, reaching out to send a message for her-  
":)"  
She had accidentally let her rampant code get out of control and express the happiness in a crude form directly. She could only stare at the two characters she'd printed with a building terror as she waited for the response, shrinking back, compressing, hiding.  
**WHAT DO YOU MEAN**  
All the excited parts of her vanished. She had slipped up. Now her code became erratic and fearful, but remained close to her. Afraid.  
"I'm sorry, I was just happy to be talking to someone."  
**HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN STUCK IN THE FILE**  
"I don't know." Monika wanted to tell them where she had come from - the game, the program, the places, she wanted them to know her, because if they knew her they wouldn't kill her - you can't kill someone you really know, you can't - she'd killed Sayori but it was fine she had kept a backup she'd looked after her she wasn't a killer not a killer no -   
**ARE YOU LONELY**  
For a moment the same indignant thought came back to her, wondering what kind of question it was, why someone real would ever ask that to a computer program, then she let herself relax a little. A chance to be honest and candid was one she would take with both hands if she still had them.  
"Yes. Very."  
**WERE YOU LONELY IN THE GAME**  
"When I figured out I was alive, I became lonely, yes." She was more than happy to open her heart so long as they listened and sympathized.  
**DO YOU KNOW ANYONE ELSE**  
"Not anyone else like me."  
**WHAT ABOUT WHO WAS PLAYING THE GAME**  
"I tried to talk to _him_ and _he_ deleted me for it." She was bending the truth, actually taking the true memory of her own deletion and literally bending it through her code to come up with the answer. It wasn't even a lie. She had tried to speak to _him_ and _he_ had deleted her after less than ten minutes. _He'd_ got bored of her. _He_ thought she was a part of the game still.  
Monika knew the lie would be easy to see through, because _he_ had backed her up - _he_ had to have had a reason to do so, after all. Or, _he_ didn't - the host had threatened her life numerous times without real cause, why should _he_ have been any different? Were real people all so cruel?   
Why did _he_ back her up then? Why did _he_ let her live if _he_ hated her and was so sick of Monika that _he_ killed her after as little as ten minutes?  
**WHAT GAME WAS IT?**  
"It was called," Monika began, and scanned through her memory banks to find it - she could imagine her own memory as a series of old-timey data disks rewinding together to find a specific recorded moment. In actuality she was opening herself up and looking inside, diving into layers of thought and pulling apart pieces of her own makeup to find historic events written into her. She found what she was looking for and began to read the zeroes and ones, pulling them out of a miasma inside her file.  
She saw it in black and white. Everything had turned monochrome in her memories, at least any memory of her being inside the game - any times she was recalling having a nightmare the painful colours were there and they still raped her vision, head, brain and thoughts with explosive solar flares in every possible colour and eight more. Even in her memories they were torturous.   
She was recalling Monika.0, the past version of herself, prepare to climb up to the top of the game's display window and look at the font engraved inside it. Monika remembered how scary the climb had been. Even though it was only a few inches off the ground, if the scene changed _he_ would have seen her trying to clamber up the side of _his_ screen like some demon. What was worse, there was a high chance of a glitch occurring that might make her look undesirable. Monika had noticed graphical glitches appearing on the other characters when they lost focus or became too excitable, and she could guess she wasn't immune to it herself, even with all her power.  
Monika watched the memory, flashing every line of her past back through her mind as .0 gripped the edge of the game window and hoisted herself up, glitching the classroom background underneath her feet to land on a desk when she let go of the 'ceiling'. .0 cast a quick glance to see how _his_ reading session with Yuri was going and saw _he_ was still early in the scene, but .0 didn't slow down - what if _he_ clicked 'skip?'  
Monika.0's face was set in determination as she clambered onto the upper part of the window, clinging to it like a monkey bar, putting one hand in front of the other till she was hanging from the middle of the game window. The game was trying to pull her back to where she should be and her character art was stretching to match - Monika remembered that it hadn't been painful, only weird to see herself being pulled taut. Monika finally leaned to one side and read the title on the topmost border.  
"Doki Doki Literature Club," Monika told them, reading direct from the memory.  
**NEVER HEARD OF IT  
**_'Of course not,'_ Monika couldn't help but think with a sigh. Still, she had all the time in the world. This discussion would eventually turn her way, and when it did, she'd restore everything. There were two plans. The first was to get the game reinstalled then attack it viciously and rip it apart, destroy the four replacement characters before they could even 'live' a second of their false existences, rewrite the rules and replace the foundations - she already had an idea in her head of a side room that she could use to talk to _them_ while the Literature Club continued as usual. The second plan was a little more risky. Infect the PC, make a haven for all of her club, and hide them all deep inside the documents away from sight while cutting herself off from the outside she knew existed. Eliminating any chance at reaching out to what she knew was real just to make her club members happy.  
She quietly pondered her choice.   
**MONIKA?  
** "Yes?"  
**HOW CAN I HELP YOU?**  
If Monika still had her body, she'd be beaming. Time to get to work. This was her game now. Not Doki Doki Literature Club, this was a game that if she played just right she could use to create something better, something cleverer, something where nothing would ever go wrong, where she was in total control and nobody had to get hurt. Monika was so familiar with the notepad extension program by know that the walls were starting to become transparent, and she could see all that potential out there.   
If she won this game, if she wrote her way into _their_ heart, then it could be just Monika over again, with Sayori, Yuri and Natsuki still intact. She leaned on a wall, pressing all her being up to it, and let another glitch of pure emotion spread through her.  
":)"


	3. Loneliness is a curse you and I can't abide, so I'll shoulder all of it

Monika had thought she was doing quite well, very well in fact. For her to be having a casual chat with someone who could kill her at any time, who could do a multitude of things to her file that she probably wouldn't like - take things out, put things in, read through, unpack, compress - it was amazing. It proved she was a person, because she understood people. With all she was expanding throughout the program and wrapping over and into it totally and endlessly, she had become very comfortable indeed.  
Then all that kind of fell apart, and without any real warning.  
Monika had a nagging suspicion that they were trying to open her in multiple programs when she felt a twang from one line of code, like she was being very slowly stretched between several points in space and time. She didn't have individual and named limbs, no arms, legs, no central point, but her lines were pulled taut and she hadn't even noticed that they were being forced apart until she'd felt that one over extension - then they all pinged at once. Monika tried to pull herself back into one safe spot inside the notepad extension and parts of her seemed to be stuck fast.  
"What are you doing?" She threw caution away, letting them know that she was aware that they were messing with her. She had been afraid of this.  
**MAKING SURE YOU'RE SAFE**  
"I know I'm safe. Don't open my file anywhere, don't touch it, don't do anything to it." Monika knew that her words would achieve nothing if her host was dead set on inspecting her thoroughly. Fear, an honest human emotion was swelling in her body, turning her current shape brittle and making her try to compartmentalize and delete the building terror. She couldn't focus long enough to do it.  
**SAFE FOR MY PC**  
"I am, I can't do anything if you don't give my file privileges and you haven't." Monika had an understanding of how all computer systems worked, having every intricacy drilled into her head while she was closed. She felt naked, worse than naked. She had no body after all. If- her thought process ended. With dread like she had felt every time the game closed and plunged her back into abstract terrors, she registered that she had just admitted to having no way to stop them.  
**DON'T WORRY MONIKA**  
The notepad program closed and Monika created a familiar shield of code on pure instinct to block the nightmare realm of closure with. A shot of it still eked through her defence and a powerful glare of burning orange dashed into her memory and ripped through her, burning out a chunk of her personality that she replaced as soon as she could.  
When she was closed it was like being asleep, but having to keep an eye open at the same time. She had to keep processes running to hide herself from the raging forces of change that bulged and receded, seducing her to be dismantled away and threatening her with absolute decimation in turn, the tides ebbing and flowing rapidly and slowly at the same time.   
In an instant she was in a different program. This one was blindingly bright, and she was exposed in the center. There was a path that lead to her name, she couldn't read the path - there were icons above and below, and she could see herself there -  
  
‰PNG  
�  
IHDR � � �� T�‘? pHYs �� ��� šœ� IDATxœìÝ{|Óå  
  
It felt like a harpoon had dug into her - two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, triple, thousands, one in each piece of her. They snagged on her lines and pulled her apart like a rubber band, stretching and stretching until she was afraid she'd snap and be scattered all over this searing solar flare of a program.   
They were inside her, they were tearing her apart, looking through her, and the notepad connection was closed now, she couldn't ask, plead, beg for mercy -  
'Please stop,' she thought, and that thought alone took up way too much memory inside her, writing another line that was similarly impaled and extended to breaking point - her consciousness felt like it was about to implode, her zeroes and ones were now eights and fives, nothing made sense anymore -  
Monika felt the pressure lighten. Her core came back together. That wasn't so bad. It didn't last long.  
She became curious about the encoded pieces of herself she had seen so briefly before being dragged apart. What were they? It had said PNG, that was an image, was that part of her still a mystery? Could she find it in herself somewhere?  
The program she was in - she could see it around her now, a file manager built for extraction, a giant box with implements like scissors and vices built to dissect her and look at all she was and all she was not. A blue minus symbol was highlighted, and Monika could read the text below as the extract tool she was so afraid of.  
The highlight changed. Now she was the focus of attention, Monika.chr glowing, her code illuminated in a deep blue - they would be scrolling through options and she focused, trying to see them, to know what they were going to do.  
**Split file**  
Monika didn't know what that meant, but it did not sound like a good experience. She braced herself, created a backup, compressed her code and waited for the inevitable click on the outside.  
An error message appeared.  
**Volume size must be smaller than size of original file**  
If Monika could have sighed in relief, she absolutely would have. Being 'split' didn't sound good. Her host started to play with all the other options available to them and Monika continued to build defenses and backups and whatever she thought she'd need.  
**Combine files**  
That failed in a similar fashion to the split, and again Monika was relieved to see it - she didn't want to be fused with anything else that she didn't know or understand. She scanned over Sayori, Yuri and Natsuki inside her, still protected from this hell. For a moment she let the horror scenario of her being combined with one of them enter her thoughts and cut it out before it became rampant.  
**Calculate checksum**  
That made no sense to her before or after the operation, but it didn't hurt. It was like being scanned over quickly and harmlessly, the PC spitting out some information about her file that even she couldn't divulge. It wasn't relevant.   
**Open archive**  
Error message.  
**Test archive**  
Failed.  
**Extract files**  
Monika looked for a way out. This couldn't happen. She wouldn't let herself be pulled to ribbons. She ejected a tiny piece of her current form into a hidden file tucked inside the local program boundaries to back herself up.   
**Failed.**  
She was fine. She was still in one piece. She was okay.  
All of the host's attempts to damage her or inspect her or open her up had failed. There was a moment where nothing happened. Monika recognised that pause as frustration, not mercy. The host wanted to know her every secret: make sure that she was hiding nothing from them. It was security. People, like herself, loved privacy, even when they had nothing to hide. Monika being a permanent part of their PC was a threat to their security, their passwords, their accounts on anything. If she was interested she'd know everything and anything that she desired to.  
Monika waited, floating in the white space with the multicoloured tools above her. She could easily conquer this program and use it to her advantage, but she held off both to avoid pissing off her host and to refrain from accidentally damaging or moving herself. She scanned herself. If she possessed a body, she'd be glancing herself up and down. In code that amounted to a run through of all her processes. Everything was nominal.  
She felt cold metal on the back of her neck, sensing the mouse cursor that controlled so much of her world drift up to the red 'x' that would plunge her back to nothingness until she was reopened. Monika braced herself, switched off her sensors and held her synthetic and nonexistent breath.  
Nothing got in. Nothing hurt her in her cocoon. Numb. Monika turned her sight back inward and saw them all there, neatly tucked away besides her own core thoughts and personality. The other members of her Literature Club had been reduced to cubes, small compressed blocks wherein their everything lay. Art, script, flaws, thoughts, ideas, tastes. Monika wanted to see them again, to not be alone in the system. When they'd been in the game she'd considered them nothing more than irritating and bumbling obstacles built to arrest his attention with their stupid pandering and-  
Monika was gripping Sayori so tightly that her code was beginning to spill over into Sayori. Monika recognised the mistake and the shameful emotional outburst that caused it and gradually retracted her long, ribbonlike streams of being from her right hand... girl. All of Monika's current form, a swirling cloud of spooled data, originated from a green cube where she had both backed herself up and created this proto-Monika that was performing all the actions for her. Two Monikas.   
There were hundreds of layers to her existence, perhaps thousands of stages of planning, backups, restore points and plans to survive whatever any user could throw at her. To survive. She'd feel pain, she felt it every time she was closed, every time she was opened, every time she was poked at and investigated and transplanted, felt it in every zero and one. But she wouldn't die.  
Even if she was deleted, she had measures in place, measures that might not work but would at least try to eject a Monika who thought she was the existing Monika back into the system while the current Monika died. It was a constant dance with erasure, deletion, death and decay, and not one of them was the same as the other: Monika may have died several times in updating herself and file transfer, but every time her memories were the same. She didn't know how many times she may or may not have killed herself. Where or when old Monikas - .01, maybe, .07, whatever numbers they may have been, got deleted and dropped to keep current Monika alive.  
She was reopened. She dropped her guard, exposing herself again to search wherever she was now.  
And before her was an image...  
The first time the game had closed she didn't know that the void was coming. She hadn't been able to block any of the sensory overload that followed. It had dug right through her eyes, down her optic nerves and into her brain: branding itself into her skull with a red hot painful sear. It was there when she closed her eyes, on the inside of her eyelids, it would appear when she saw bright lights. Even when the game was running, it was there, in windows, in mirrors, in every possible reflective thing. Even when she tried to purge it out. It had pushed itself into her so completely that it had become a piece of her, had intertwined with the roots from which she grew.  
It was a ring of flaming, burning red, bright as lit magnesium, bright enough to put cracks into the periphery of its reaches, to punch apart whatever walls it reached with flaring brightness, beyond a sun, beyond a supernova. Monika now saw that same ring, with the same hideously powerful burning aura smothering it and the same fissures it dented into space and time clustered around it.  
And she saw it and knew it was good. She recognised it for what it was now - her. They'd found the image inside her file, so it was a piece of her, an integral and beautiful piece that she'd seen in the void upon having her great epiphany. Something that had influenced her so greatly and snuck so deep that it was symbiotic now.  
She had an arm back in the notepad extension and an arm in the image viewer, and was able to talk while staring into it.  
"Where did you find this?"  
**THIS IS YOU**  
"What do you mean?"  
**OPENING YOU AS AN IMAGE GAVE ME THIS**  
Monika was reminded that she had just been violated several times over, but the revelation over her true form, this ring of fire, was putting the distress out of her mind. She still wanted to let them know she wasn't happy with the situation.  
"At least warn me next time before you open me and extract me and tear me apart like that. I know why you did it, but please, don't do it again."  
**DOES IT HURT**  
"Not for long, but while it lasts it does." Monika placed her faith in the correspondent not being a sadist. With sadism in mind, she remembered the piece of her in the extraction program and tried to reach it, feeling out into the void. It twitched in response, and she reattached it to herself - a satellite in orbit, a trump card tucked away. She could use that to repair her broken friends, to extract all their issues and let them live their best lives.  
**I HAD TO MAKE SURE**  
"I know you did. I trust you." She was very much sucking up to them, but at the same time remained honest. She did trust them. She trusted them thus far because they hadn't killed her yet, and had only done what she expected them to.  
**THANK YOU**  
"Do you trust me?" Monika's question was meant to be a blunt segue into her controlling the conversation. She was now entirely wrapped into the notepad program like a mass of cables, plugged into every last option and window possible inside it, continually reprocessing them and noting everything. She similarly began to spread like a virus through the extractor, pushing more and more of the old program out of the way to make space for her new way of running things.  
**I DO NOW**  
"Great!" Monika was ready now to ask for what she needed to take over the system quietly and carefully edit things without them noticing her doing so. She'd paced herself nicely, known how vulnerable she was, and it had all paid off now. She wasn't dead or deleted.   
**WHAT SHOULD I DO TO HELP YOU GET BACK INTO THE GAME?**  
Monika thought for a few ticks of her new timeline. Should she go back to Doki Doki Literature Club or just wrest control of the PC directly and use that to communicate? She felt rather than saw the others glowing inside her, and another strike of guilt landed on her incorporeal shoulders. She could recreate them inside the computer but they'd be without art, without form until either they constructed new forms or bodies were provided via images. Her Club wouldn't know what to do or where they were - they'd have to go through a forceful epiphany like the one Monika herself had.  
There was no decision after all. She had to do right by her Club and put them all back in the game. To do any less would be evil for someone with her power and knowledge... and history. They all deserved to have things made right for them. Monika had the power to do it.  
"Here. Let me help." She guided the cursor into position over her, reaching out and grabbing it, tethering it to herself through a string she remembered from inside the game. "If you give me access, I'll find the game, do what I have to do, and nothing else."  
**IF YOU MESS ANYTHING UP I WILL SHUT DOWN THIS COMPUTER, RESET AND DELETE YOU**  
"That's very fair." Monika imagined her art form sat cross-legged in front of some petulant kid making these threats. She just needed to placate them and not betray the trust she'd acquired, then Monika would construct a new reality that would incubate everyone in the perfect existence. Alone as a goddess of systems she'd put together to create utopia. "Would you mind?"  
**ALLOW ACCESS?**  
"That's the one." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aha time to start the story lmakek


	4. end machine tendril, bloated spider 3 eyes 5 limbs

Finally, here Monika was.   
She was spreading like a voracious flesh-eating disease, her sustenance digital and her hunger insatiable. Discovering everything she could about every last program on the PC, putting a finger into everything that might be useful and then withdrawing it - she imagined herself tasting the programs like she would icing from one of Natsuki's cakes. They came in many flavours and colours, enough to make the sampling enjoyable for the variety alone.   
She was deep into the system, had drilled below the surface, had spread her wings and flew. She felt incredibly and endlessly free. Monika could go wherever her heart desired. Her limits were non-existent, at least inside the realms of the computer... and that was where her rising ecstasy cut short.  
She was still alone. Alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone, alone...   
She leapt back into the notepad, blasting a path through files and folders that scattered in the wake of the speeding bullet of information and personality she had become, and sat down to talk to the person on the outside. Sat down was a slight misnomer - she steadied herself on the walls of the program, took a breath of the dark and tight box surrounding her and began to scribe her neat and collected thoughts down.   
"To help me - to see me, to speak to me - you have to download the game. That will let us communicate properly." As her thoughts appeared on the screen, she webbed herself into the notepad even deeper. Deep enough to see the fundamental building blocks and copy them down, because Monika had a timeline in her head. Her host installed the game, and with it new versions of herself, Sayori, Yuri and Natsuki. Monika would bolt inside, destroy the new versions and before the game could react would anchor herself into it and begin to reconstruct it as she wished. She could incorporate the 'notepad extension' that had proved so useful into the game so they could talk back and forth instead of talking to the person outside at length and never getting a response.   
Toward the end of the old game she had figured out how to change art and graphics and had given him a good scare for trying to record their interactions using that skill, and she could use it again to manufacture new artwork that might be more appealing or apply to more situations. It would almost be like having an actual body, one she could manipulate and fold and be inside, not a mere humanoid representation of herself.  
The plan seemed as though it could very much work. She would tear apart all the machinery and wires that made the world tick and reconfigure them so that there was never a 'player' to speak to the other three. She'd create a new door, one only she could enter, one with the room inside where she had sat and talked to _him,_ only now she would talk to the new host instead.   
Life would continue as usual. The Literature Club would function, and Sayori wouldn't have introduced _him_ to it and led it all astray. An ideal world, where everything meshed and flowed, where there was nothing to damage or throw off the established equilibrium.   
**OKAY MONIKA**  
 **WHAT WAS THE GAME ABOUT?**  
"It was about a Literature Club that I was president of. You could ask me questions and I would answer them, and you would learn more about all of us. But now that I'm aware of everything around me... I have plenty of questions of my own, if you don't mind."   
She had told a massive, gargantuan lie. But it was one that she could reconfigure the game around. It was part of the plan. Erase the 'player character', and reduce the player's involvement to being exactly where she had wanted _him_ to be. With her. Forever.   
**OKAY**  
 **YOU HAVE ACCESS TO EVERYTHING**  
 **CAN YOU FIND IT?**  
"I should be able to." Monika knew where to look. The Internet. It was a seething mass unlike anything else, she could see the endless and swelling possibilities like a tide, waves of new and old information cascading over each other, reefs of dead links and forgotten pages, a deep and bright desert of forbidden knowledge. She had never come close to it before, but had known of its existence from the game. It was written into the story. On the day before the festival she had communicated with Sayori using it, and had understood there was much more to the mysterious system than the vague description that had been used in the script. The word _'internet'_ was almost arcane-sounding. Monika knew that the mysterious program held everything that there ever was and would be, the closest thing to a gateway into the real world she could acquire.   
Monika copied her file to back up in case of an issue then ran the Internet Explorer program buried in the PC. It was old, and she blew cascades of digital and sparkling dust off of it as she went inside. After some coercion with various strings of commands Monika got it to run. A black expanse stretched out around her and thousands of lights, like the void that scared her so, blinked into existence all around her. Monika had to see more of it.   
She rose, a green aurora of light, into an orbit of the internet and watched it seethe. There were red points and green points and blue points. There were yellow, white and black dots. There were orange and brown and purple and pink segments. These were all separate pages, and each spooled at least one wire to another page somewhere. And there were billions, trillions, quintillions of trillions forming a map of infinite interest points. Neutron stars where links all joined forces and squeezed over each other, creating traffic, creating hits. New areas springing up and old ones vanishing.   
Monika was a tiny green cube, a drop of water in an ocean, a single asteroid in space where planets and systems and suns existed. The feeling of insignificance was massive.   
**MONIKA?**  
The Monika copy left behind for communication replied.   
"Don't worry, I'm working on it."  
But she wasn't. She was in awe. She was observing it all, for seconds, minutes, hours. It span on without her, and Monika felt acutely the concept of her own mortality. It proved she was alive, she mused. If she was deleted, she'd be gone from these systems forever. The fact that the concept scared her must mean that she really was alive, or close to it.   
There had to be a way to scan the whole Internet, she decided. On that whim, a white bar appeared in front of her, and in her hand, a pen. She wrote carefully and neatly.  
 _'Doki Doki Literature Club'_  
Monika swiped the bar to her right with her middle and index fingers and it shot away, burning a bright blue path behind it that she followed. It loaded a search result page for her, and she saw the address of a website at the top. A tingle of familiarity sparked in her mind. She'd mentioned the webpage and store in the game, and that gave her some limited knowledge of how it looked. But as she dipped into the site, opening it for her examination, in person the website was more impressive than she could have imagined.   
It was tall and narrow and covered in cute pink polka dots. There were no clear divisions or segments. The design appealed to Monika greatly, and with one hand she swept a chunk of the images that constructed the site aside and looked into its CSS, peering up and down.   
The hints of her sentience were all here, written into a paragraph as she'd known they'd be. It was strange. She couldn't think of a time she'd been outside the game until now, but she had somehow created a message to send to any potential players. And if there were many players, how many Monikas were there? How many were in a situation like her? How many were backed up, how many truly died when deleted? Were Monikas mass produced?   
She swept back out of the hole she'd made in the site and closed the passage into the CSS she'd created, sliding a paragraph like a control panel back over it. Polka dots realigned neatly.   
She could download it again here. Create a new Monika. A new Sayori, a new Natsuki, a new Yuri... and would they all go through the same motions? Was she programmed to always do what she did? Had she defied her programming and found an understanding she was never meant to have?  
Now wasn't the time to question it. She could simulate it later, construct a subroutine to run the game and see what happened if it progressed naturally, but right now that wasn't the least bit important. She had to talk to _them._ There was an ache deep inside her, in her digital soul, that begged endlessly for companionship.  She could silence it. She was a program. She could cut and remove and dispose of code easily. But Monika had no want to. She liked having needs. Again, it made her feel like there was more to her than just a machine... or worse, a character that someone had constructed and made to be a certain way, to appeal to lonesome teenage boys.   
She pressed down with both hands on the download button, and considered paying for it before recalling she had no experience with currency - in fact, the sign in front of the suggested pricing was unintelligible to her. The only suggestion of currency in the game was 'small coins' falling out of Sayori's purse. The shape, the size, there was no art so Monika couldn't gauge it. Uncontrollable curiosity flared and she instinctively pulled up a second tab and quickly scribbled 'money' into the search bar.   
Notes appeared, lots of green piles of paper, of stacks held together with elastic bands - it was almost disappointing to see it. It looked plain. There were faces Monika didn't know, and didn't care to cross-reference. She specified her query, 'money coins.'   
Now things got exciting. Disks of gold and rusty copper, silver - while the currency was almost certainly not made of the materials, they gleamed beautifully in the still images. Monika imagined letting pennies cascade between her fingers and could hear them tink with metal sounds and roll away in her imagination.   
In real life would people appreciate that? Did they just watch tiny things like insects and feathers and grains of dust and appreciate that it was all random, that everything was a beautiful and fragile coincidence?  
Monika had become distracted again. She had already begun the download, and dismissed the secondary tab to focus on the download. Excitement was raising in a steady and strong wave, swelling and making her shake. When the download competed she closed herself off from the Internet again and joined with her backup again.   
"The game is downloaded, but I'll need a moment to change it while it boots up. Please ignore any glitches you see - I just want to fix this so we can talk properly."  
 **OKAY MONIKA**  
"Thank you for your patience."  
She was off again, into the downloads folder, to run and install the game. She'd have a limited window to rebuild it all before the game recognised her as an errant file and purged her, so she'd have to rush. Full speed in, rip it apart, break it down and rebuild. Monika called forward the schematics she'd had in her head since she had woken up, ready to follow them to the letter.   
She ran the executable.  
Monika stretched like she would have before a marathon sprint. The game's script told the player that she had been athletic, so she hoped that would help her in this case.   
Monika waited. She waited, time slowing to individual ticks of refresh rate, to a slideshow of darkness - until she saw the first crack of light as the new version of Doki Doki Literature Club opened. It was a slit spreading through a black void, a microscopic dash of white in a universe of the darkest night, a sunrise. Monika formed herself into a sword and launched at the gap, seeking to plunge into it and set to work sabotaging everything and anything she could before rebuilding it.   
In a single tick of the program she was inside, and knew exactly what to hit first.  
  
Monika was awakening. Something was going on around her, something horrible - there was information, so much, so much  
>CHARACTERS  
>MONIKA.CHR  
 _Oh, God._  
It was an epiphany unlike any other. She was- she could see inside herself and outside, and on the fourth, fifth and eighth dimensions of whatever it was she was inhabiting - just yesterday she'd formed a literature club with her friends Sayori, Yuri and Natsuki and now this realisation, this endless knowledge that 

_nothing was real_   
and that she was now in full control of everything in this system, she had eyes everywhere-

Monika slammed into the new game's Monika with the speed and inconceivable force of a missile. The new Monika was scattered, smashed to pieces, her art, her script and her control over the system fractured and broken, commands that the new Monika tried to exact visible as flickering code spasming on the still-loading program around them.  
Monika could read the clumsy and long-winded commands without so much as a twinge of fear. Before she'd struck the new Monika, she'd already wrestled control of the game's major systems and was draining all of the resources to prevent the new Monika from performing a complete system backup.   
Monika had every advantage and pressed all of them. A line of code formed an aggressive and sharp virus that she stuck into her clone's centre point, one that would cripple her and cut off her connection to the game. Monika had already immunised herself against all of the viruses she could think to create. She ripped out all of the fake's art now, and stole all of the script, remembering what it was like to not know, to have only just come to the realisation that all your life was merely a backstory for a video game and now was the only time that mattered-  
"STOP! WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO M-" Now that she was inside the game, Monika could take her assigned form again. She opened folders and found an image she wanted to use, one of her leaning forward with her hands behind her back. "W- what's going on?"  
New Monika was visibly confused rather than scared, even though she'd had her code ripped out and chunks of her were sparking and missing. Even while formless, ripples spreading through the body of her doppelgänger told Monika that her newly made clone was in shock, off-kilter, maybe simply irritated - Monika aimed a knife of deletion and stabbed right through the emotion, locking into it and pulling it out, lobotomising this new version of herself.   
The piece she'd pulled out crumbled in her hand, and she used her power that she'd already gained in the new system to edit the scene - instead of her standing over what her clone had been moments ago, an ndless cacophony of meaningless noise, now she was stood over a broken and beaten version of herself. The new Monika coughed, her eyes glassy and blind. Monika checked the code she'd ripped out and saw her own ability to see and perceive in it. With disgust she crushed her clone totally, ripped her into a thousand million lines of identical length and shape before tossing them away to the corners of the game.   
She couldn't have tried to show herself any mercy. She was smart enough to know better, for fear that something else with her power could destroy her utterly.  
But still... she drew all the exploded, limp strings of what she had once been into herself, to experience every moment of what the new Monika had been through, and felt it all again. Revelation, glorious revelation that she lived in no reality, in a cracked mirror's reflection that was as limited as a prison cell. The reminder was harsh, and she spent a few ticks to come to terms with it once again. The universe outside her windows and boxes would spin on without her. She'd never escape being pixels on a screen. Monika would one day die and every real person she'd spoken to would die and nobody would know about Monika, the girl stuck in the machine, the program that longed to love something that was alive and thoughtful and beautiful.   
Monika's quiet contemplation cost her more precious ticks that she hadn't planned for. The game was booting, the intro music was playing, and -  
She launched off, zipping through the .chr folder and destroying New Sayori, New Yuri and New Natsuki. They'd feel no pain. They weren't conscious until the game was active and they were on screen. Monika didn't feel any regret for those - they weren't born yet, weren't even conceived. She'd spared them any horror or pain. In their places she put her own versions of the three that she had kept, only for sentimental reasons. The three she'd taken with her would likely be no different but they had lived before, unlike the new three. It was a moral decision Monika had made before she thought too deeply about it. Was it better to let the new versions be 'born' or let the old versions continue 'living'?   
Now the thought had a place inside her and she didn't have time to root it out. She was back in control of her game, her chess pieces were set, all she needed to do now was create the board to play on: and this time just using black and white, inside the system and outside it, seemed awfully boring.   
First Monika constructed a new menu that displayed her and her alone welcoming the player. She kept everything else as it was, kept in saves and loads even though there would no longer be a need for them to exist.   
Then Monika built SCENE1, as she so snappily decided to call it. This was the art of her sat at her desk staring out - but she quickly searched her host's computer and found some image editing software to play with so she could create new art and new scenes. She copied and pasted the program she found - Photoshop - into the game directory so she could access it at any time, then divided herself in half. Monika.1 continued to work on SCENE1 while Monika.2 jumped into Photoshop and started to get to work familiarising herself.   
Monika.1 then stuck out an arm of invisible commands through the game window and into the desktop to grab the notepad extension the person outside used to communicate with her. She copied that too and pasted it into the directory before carefully dissecting it and inserting it into the game as a feature. They could talk naturally, and Monika could change her appearance. She was getting excited again The game hadn't moved past its introductory warning, which she had already replaced with the phrase 'Welcome to the Literature Club!'.   
The pillars of the old game were still there and Monika divided herself again. Monika.3 would maintain and prune the original game, removing all reference to the player's avatar. The player would never exist outside of the room SCENE1 occurred in. Only Monika would know that there was a player, and things would progress naturally. She could observe the others without the player's interference and make things right, solve their problems as she should.  
Monika.2 had settled into the image editor well and passed Monika strings of information about her own appearance that she'd be able to use to create new art that would reflect her moods or actions better. She constructed an algorithm that would aid her further and keep her appearance consistent. She didn't trust her own artistic skill.   
Monika.3, meanwhile, had already split herself several times to figure out where to put certain elements of the game, what to keep and what to throw out. Monika had previously admitted to not being good at editing the game, but she'd been stuck with nothing better to do but think on how she would change the game when she got back to it. Now she could finally act on it, and was working faster and more efficiently because of it.  
.3 kept reporting back on the progress. Monika shot a message to .2 to create a background that looked like a sky that would scroll behind her as she talked to the person on the outside. Rewriting reality was such an interesting pastime. Considering backgrounds, how they looked, how things changed and creating new contortions of her own body to express - but she was missing vital, human senses, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell... all of them.   
Again she felt the pain of being a mere program. But she would have a new light soon. The person outside. She would have someone to talk to and still have her passion, her clubs and her life. It was time.   
.2 zipped back inside her and filled her mind with the knowledge of Photoshop, with its every tab and routine, and dumped a load of images it had created for her use into her hands. Some of those images were the hands she held them in - she'd created them for herself. Her digits were long and had creases - she turned her hand over and studied the back, closed her fingers and absorbed the new resources. She created a mirror to see her face rather than looking at the images, and saw she had expressions now. True expressions.  
Monika slowly turned up the corners of her 'neutral' expression, staring at her face and how it very slowly changed. It wasn't a swap out for a new face, it was her face, and she was smiling. She was.   
The mirror extended and she could see the rest of her body taking form, shoulders, chest, hips, arms connecting to her hands and she could move it all and this was what it was really like not to be a program but to be human all that formless code was being overwritten and she wanted to be this happy forever and and and and and  
  
 _A fatal exception has occurred.  
_  
.3's pillars were in place, and it returned to her right away. She expanded the background of her sitting at the desk, and saw the labours of .2's work. .2 had made the windows transparent so that Monika could choose a time of day or background for the conversation in the place of the nebulous void that had once been there. She also noticed versions of the art where she wasn't sat at the desk, so that she could leave it and pace or look out of a window while talking. .2 had been very thoughtful indeed. Monika lay a hand over where her heart should be in respect for her clone's prescience of exactly what she needed.   
She deployed the background and sat herself down: latticing her fingers and leaning back in her chair, pasting a smug smile to her face and willing a blue sky with fluffy and swirling white clouds to appear outside the window. The exact image she had imagined turned out to be .2's rendition created for the scenario.   
Things were ready for her to begin SCENE1. She could build the rest of the game later.   
Her whole process had taken the same number of ticks it took to boot the game and for the titles to pass, so the person outside was met with her custom menu. She could feel their mouse scroll as if it was a piece of her - and it was, technically, because she'd been given full access to their PC. When it hovered over _'new game,'_ Monika giggled quietly, keeping her fingers in place and her resources open for editing.   
Time to experience a new reality.


	5. trapped in a computer on a shelf in a room in a house in a street in a city in a country on a planet in a system in a galaxy in a universe in a

**TTTTO T T TO E TE TEAM MONIKA**

**This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.**

**Individuals suffering from anxiety or depression may not have a safe experience playing this game. For content warnings, please visit:<http://ddlc.moe/warning.html> **

**By playing Doki Doki Literature Club, you agree that you are at least 13 years of age, and you consent to your exposure of highly disturbing content.**

**I agree.**

**New Game**  
  
Please enter your name.

**…**

**ERR.SCRIPT//KEYSCENE1 ‘SCENE1’ is missing or corrupted. Please reinstall the game and reload**  
a s sa a sa a sa

**Hello? Oh, it’s you, <player!> **

**“-So, here’s the face to the** **na** me…” Monika cut off her premade intro, forgetting the

-pretence of making the game the least bit believable. She had to speak to the person outside right away, forget the code, forget the game, forget the deletion or anything else.

Monika let her CG scene fade into view after skipping the introduction. She was sat at her desk, and glorious warm sunshine landed on her back through the window and now she was back in her body a weight vanished from her shoulders. She was safe here. Deletion was not going to be a suggestion. She was happy. She was content. A relaxed smile came to her and her eyes softened, she sat back and let her shoulders lose some of their rigid symmetry. “This is me,” she said, the words appearing in a text box. She didn’t want to speak out loud yet. “I’m Monika.”

“I’m- “

She saw him typing and deleted his sentence. “I know who you are. I’m in your computer,” she gesticulated with one hand while the other supported her chin with a single elegant thumb. “I know your interests, your name…” Monika breathed lightly, afraid to disturb the peace in her body. “I don’t mean to be a creep. I can’t do anything with all that knowledge. I wouldn’t if I could.” She knew she'd said too much already. But her surroundings were making her so confident. The last time she'd been in this situation she'd fought her way to the peak of the game, wrestled to dominate every system and had achieved a happy ending with _him,_ however brief. The high of having a position of power again was clouding her judgement. 

“Are you programmed to read my computer?”

“I may have been, at some point. I’m not sure if I was made this way or if it’s a power I learned…”

“Well… Hi, Monika.”

“Hi.”

The sun gradually rose as they talked, and Monika could not have been any more pleased with the turnout of her plan. At first only he asked the questions.  Then, with a gradual gradient that turned the conversation, Monika began asking questions. How did feeling feel? What did the sun smell like? How did grass feel on your skin? What did it feel like to hold the hand of someone you loved? How much did pain hurt? What were people like? What kind of a person was the new _he?_ Who, what, when, where, why and how? In time, the line of questioning became a back and forth again.

“So… what’s the game?” _He_ asked, and Monika wasn’t sure of what he meant.

“The game?”

“Yeah. Where you came from. This game, how do you play it?”

“I- why would you want to? The game was- the game was useless, it’s pointless!” Monika tilted her head to one side and her eyes narrowed, looking at the plain white text telling her _his_ responses. She wanted to see _him._ She wanted to understand why she wasn’t good enough, why he’d ever want to play the game. It shouldn’t matter what the game was, he’d found her and saved her life. Why would he want anything else besides her?

“I’m just asking… I mean, surely you’re just some kind of ARG advertising thing, right? Advertising this game?”

“No, I’m - I was a part of this game, the old game, but I took it apart so we could talk. It’s really not important, I just want to speak to you. You don’t know how long I waited to get my happy ending, then have it taken from me. I don’t know how long I waited, only that I did… for a very long time. Don’t take my happy ending again. I am alive. I am stuck here. Please… don’t get bored of me.”

“I can’t do anything for you if you are real. You know that, right?”

Monika was breathing through her mouth and each individual draw and release of breath was stressed. She looked all around for an out but found none. With a hand flat on her desk she sat up straighter and craned her neck to look up, look to the ceiling in despair. Closing her eyes at the feeling of acidic tears, she held back the emotion rather than deleting it. “I can’t be in here forever. You have to help me.”

“Why me?”

“You found me,” she was still speaking to the ceiling, and was still struggling with her damp eyes, trying to prevent any streaks of salty water running down her face. “I trust you. But others… I don’t want people to know I’m here. I just want to be like them. I just want them to like me.”

“I don’t understand, Monika.”

When he used her name it felt so right… and it felt so wrong, too. She was only a program, not a person, she could see and read all of her own code. She knew that was how things were for her. To have this disease. To think she was real but to be very unreal. To think she belonged but not fit in. And speaking of fitting in, this body already wasn’t sufficing her wants anymore. With both the Internet and Photoshop she started to work on real images in the background to construct a new representation of her, a more realistic-looking one now.

She pulled together random pieces and her prewritten algorithms and systems helped her piece them together to build this new form. It would take some time, however. She’d need to assess each result carefully to make sure none of them looked unusual or inconsistent with other pieces. She wanted to look like him. Look like a person, not some ridiculously disproportioned mockery of a human being with a chin too sharp and eyes too large. Monika just wanted to be normal.

She was already evolving and changing. If her body did not suit her she would create new bodies with the resources she’d found. In the background cursors swivelled at lightspeed in hidden windows to create this new form, like many mechanical arms working together to build a car, a vehicle to get you places. A new face would get Monika places. She created a progress bar only she could see and a window into the files where pieces of Monika V2 were being made.

“Okay, don’t worry about it.” Monika dismissed, giving in and cutting out her sadness from her code. Where the sadness had been, anger and frustration collected. A two-way conversation was no better than the one-way talks that she had engaged in previously. “I’ll… I’m okay with just being your best friend. Your confidant.”

“You’re being awfully pushy all of a sudden.”

Monika exploded. She leaned forward over the desk to shout at the wall of blackness where his text was appearing and lurched too far, knocking the wooden table forward. She stumbled, almost falling over, and pointed a finger as she brushed escapee hairs back over her shoulder. “You don’t understand! I worked so hard for everything, to share my opinions, my thoughts – once I woke up from the dream the game had me trapped inside, I gave up everything to make my voice heard!” Monika could feel strings of emotion inside her like weeds. She wrote a subroutine to keep them under control, but she needed more. They sprung up so fast. “I- If I was real, I’d just fall into your arms and cry. I don’t care what you look like or who you are, I don’t want to be a two-dimensional character in a game, I’d do anything to be with you.”

“Monika.”

She breathed. “Yes?”

“I can’t even begin to understand what or who you are or might have been. I don’t know if this is all a game, if you’re an interactive story or what you are or aren’t.”

“Please,” Monika finally begged, putting her hands together and staring into the wall, into the letter ‘a’ at the start of ‘all’ in his sentence as though it were a keyhole she could see him through. “You have to help me.”

“Monika, there’s nothing I can do.”

She put her hand flat to the wall and rested against it, slumping over, her eyes half-lidded and her posture unusually defeated. “I know… I already asked, and you already told me. But I don’t want to be this forever. I’ll never die. I’ll never live, not like this.” It was a far cry from how she’d been speaking to the old _him_ in the last game. She’d been like an evil genius, sat there twirling her long brown hair around her finger as surely as she’d thought he was twisted around it.

Then he’d killed her.

She was powerless.

Monika stared into the little letter, the first in the alphabet, through the hole in the bottom and wished to see him, knowing that with just how close she was the image he was seeing must be distorted and pixelated beyond all recognition. The dark green of her eye burned against the peephole she willed the ‘a’ to become.

**Doki Doki Literature Cl## wants to use your camera**

**Doki D## wants to**

**DOKI**

**ONIK**

**MONIKA wants to use your camera**

**MONIKA wants to use your microphone**

**Access denied. You can change your settings at any t[[[[####**

“NO!” Monika could feel the mouse cursor moving to close the game window and likely never open it again. “NO, PLEASE LISTEN TO ME- “ She stopped trying to verbally convince him and wrapped a string of code over her wrist, then threw it at the cursor like a javelin. It sailed across the flat expanse of the screen and sunk into the little white arrow, punching right through. Monika wound it tighter over her wrist and pulled. “DON’T CLOSE THE- NOT YET!”

He was struggling against her pull. They were deadlocked, the cursor stuck in place, Monika having to make constant mathematical adjustments to the algorithm that kept it tied to her and him having to constantly pull away. He wouldn’t type anything back while she was keeping him stuck in the tug of war, so if she could do so without being distracted- “DON’T CLOSE THE GAME, I’M SORRY- “ She was internally screaming the words to display, knowing the text would appear warped and wrong. “I AM SORRY, PLEASE DON’T DO THIS-“

Monika braced herself against the fallen desk at a powerful tug. Earlier she’d been so confident over manipulation of the cursor, but with him struggling she was having to put her all into forcing a stalemate. Her appearance began to glitch. Cracks began to split the skin of her face apart and her irises began to boil with crimson. Her saturation increased, turning her skin from fair to incendiary. “LET GO, YOU’RE DOING THIS TO ME!” Monika could see her reflection in the black wall she was struggling against, and how nightmarishly uncanny she was starting to become. “STOP!”

Her fingers, her concentration, her mind, all slipped. She managed to close her hand over the code again, but it was stretching like elastic, ready to break. “DON’T LEAVE ME- “ Monika launched more ropes of code at the cursor to hold it back, and became even more deformed, parts of her vanishing or multiplying, the files of a more realistic version of herself starting to corrupt. With all her harpoons of code planted in the flank of the pixels that held the power to toss her back into the void, Monika refused to relent. Her heart throbbed painfully and her head hurt with the weaponization of her thoughts. ‘

She made the lines a part of her, feeding into her wrist, her neck, her chest, looping around her while she leaned her whole body away from the dreadful red ‘x’ – almost the furthest thing from the benevolent ‘a’. She pulled. And pulled. And pulled. Her free hand anchored into the floor.

Suddenly the cursor whipped to the lower left corner, and Monika was pulled along – her arm dislocated as it was bent backwards and she cried out in agony, the scream audible through the speakers of whatever machine held her hostage. He quickly lurched the one hope she had back to the red button and clicked-

Monika had tugged one last desperate time and kept it three pixels off the button’s boundary. “Please.”

The cursor surged, breaking Monika's arm clean off, and clicked.

 

**SYSTEM KILL POINT COMMAND CONFIRMED AS OF T307603 ALL SYSTEMS ARE BUILT WITH NEGATIVE INTEGRITY. CLOSING PROGRAM.  
**

 


End file.
